Today’s infographic does a great job of laying out everything you need to have on your e-commerce website to provide the best experience for your online customers. Before we get to the infographic, I’m going to share a hack that I personally employed back in the early 2000s. And no – it’s not outdated :). As you probably know, live chat can be a powerful tool for online sales, especially if you’re a smaller operation. Now, back in the early 2000s, instead of live chat software, we had instant messaging platforms. It’s basically the same thing except that the client…

The purpose behind these conversations is always the same: to highlight the importance of maintaining brand reputation in the eyes of ISPs, and ensuring that messages continue to get delivered to the inbox. A key component to achieving this is making sure customers themselves do not perceive the messages they receive as spam.

While there are official regulations such as the CAN-SPAM Act in place that make clear determinations when it comes to spam, it is also important for senders to keep in mind that “spam” is increasingly in the eye of email recipients themselves. And as far as an ISP is concerned, the recipient is always right.

So What Counts As "Spam"?

If a customer receives emails that they feel do not apply to them, that they were not expecting to receive in the first place, or even that they simply do not wish to receive any more (regardless of being properly opted in), they may mark the message as “spam” in their inbox.

This triggers a spam complaint to the ISP hosting their mailbox, and can impact reputation to that entire network—even in very small values. This is yet another reason why maintaining best practices is critical to avoid negative customer engagements and maintain inbox placement.

How Do ISPs Use This Data?

Even more critical however, is that ISPs themselves use customer evaluations of the communications they receive to inform their own filtering mechanisms. Recently, Microsoft detailed this strategy within their own Spam Fighters program. For the uninitiated, Spam Fighters essentially works by surveying a randomly selected portion of Outlook users.

In order for Microsoft’s filters to work successfully, they need to identify both good, and bad mail. What better way to inform their machine learning than by asking their users themselves? The question placed to the selected users who volunteer to participate is simple:

Is this spam? Or non-spam?

This binary statement highlights the importance of customer perception to senders. While there are other factors that contribute to a message ultimately being flagged as spam (authentication, attachments, sending IP, etc.), how the message comes across in the inbox cannot be underestimated. So put yourself in the recipient’s shoes.

A positive customer experience with relevant content going only to engaged users is the best way to ensure you don’t become another example in the “spam” category.

While we're on the subject of email marketing, how confident are you that your emails are contributing to a positive customer experience on mobile? If your subscribers are dealing with poor formatting, long load times, and unresponsive links, you're losing their attention. Download our Mobile Email Guide to learn how to fix and prevent these problems.

What makes your copy compelling? There are tons of articles detailing how power words will help your message stand out. How telling stories is the key to eliciting an emotional response and sense of camaraderie. And of course using classic formulae like AIDA to walk users through the different stages to a purchase decision. These are common steps marketers implement in an effort to create copy that convinces and converts. But copywriters and marketers worth their salt go one step further. They follow the methods outlined by the messiah of advertising David Ogilvy. They dig deep into audience research to…

What makes your copy compelling? There are tons of articles detailing how power words will help your message stand out. How telling stories is the key to eliciting an emotional response and sense of camaraderie. And of course using classic formulae like AIDA to walk users through the different stages to a purchase decision. These are common steps marketers implement in an effort to create copy that convinces and converts. But copywriters and marketers worth their salt go one step further. They follow the methods outlined by the messiah of advertising David Ogilvy. They dig deep into audience research to…

Relationships with bloggers, thought leaders and senior decision makers are invaluable. Influencer marketing, when done correctly, can be mutually beneficial for all involved. That said, most brand marketers are executing some form of “influencer marketing” nowadays, and it’s becoming more and more difficult to cut through the noise. Some marketing leaders have even opened the hood on their outreach marketing. This often results in novice level marketers incorrectly using those outreach templates and applying them without considering the appropriate context they were sent in. Guess what happens next? Influencers get barraged with an onslaught of cheesy, non-personalized emails and LinkedIn…

When users keep coming back month after month, it helps you grow your business rapidly and it makes you a very happy business owner.

But when you’re losing more customers than you’re gaining, it can spell disaster for your business.

What makes it frustrating is that you don’t always have a clear picture of what causes people to churn or what you should do about it.

Sure, you can use analytics and it will tell you a lot. But it won’t tell you why people are leaving.

That’s where feedback loops come in.

Building feedback loops into your business allows you to gather data that you can’t get from analytics. You’ll get valuable insights straight from the people who are handing over their hard-earned money: your customers.

In this article, we’ll look at some of the ways you can build customer feedback loops into your business and how to use the feedback that you gain.

How Feedback Loops Help You Reduce Churn

Before we go over some ways you can build in customer feedback loops into your business, let’s look at how they reduce churn.

They help you create an awesome product

You can be the best marketer, the best developer, or the best designer, but if your product doesn’t solve a problem you’re fighting an uphill battle. Especially if your business depends on people buying from you month after month.

One of the best ways to improve your product is to make sure it meets your customer’s needs. How do you figure out those needs? You guessed it: customer feedback.

And while feedback isn’t the be all and end all of product improvement, it helps you figure out if you’re on the right track.

Leadpages, for example, allows people to vote on what they want to see implemented next. This gives them an idea of what their product is missing and what they need to do to make it better.

They help you write copy that connects

Good copy is crucial for any business.

It’s the first thing people see when they land on your website. If you get it right. Your copy can communicate everything your customer needs to know about your business. It can tell them what you’re about, what you can do for them, what their life is going to look like when they use your product.

But if you get it wrong, if your copy doesn’t speak to your audience, they’re going to leave, never to be seen again. Bad copy costs you a lot of money.

In order to write good copy, you need to know what words and phrases your customer uses and how they talk about their problems. This isn’t something you can just come up with in a vacuum or by looking at analytics. You need customer feedback to figure this out.

Once you start using the exact words and phrases your target audience uses, though, they’ll feel like you truly understand what they’re going through. Your copy will be better aligned with what they want and they’ll have a better idea of what to expect.

In October 2016, Hubspot hired conversion copywriter Joel Klettke to help them create better sales copy. Instead of just hammering out new copy, Joel used feedback gathered from surveys, chat logs, and support to create a customer-driven message that increased the total volume of demo requests by 35% and increased the total volume of product signups by 27%.

They allow you to create a better user experience

In order to get people to use your product, you have to show them how to get value out of it as quickly as possible. That means guiding them through the initial stages.

But if you don’t know what is valuable to your users, you could be helping users with the wrong thing.

By using feedback loops, you’ll learn what people are having trouble with and what they consider something valuable. Once you know that, you can craft a user/onboarding experience that sets people up for long term use of your product.

They help you get better, more qualified customers

One of the big advantages of using customer feedback loops is that they help you form a crystal clear image of who your ideal customer is.

You can map out their wants and needs. You get to see what type of people they are. You can figure out what job they have and how they use your product.

You’ll be able to see which customers benefit the most from your product and who might be better off using another solution. You’ll be able to direct your marketing efforts to the people who you know will love it and use it a lot.

4 Common Types of Customer Feedback Loops

Now that we’ve gone over the benefits of using loops in your funnel, let’s explore what types of feedback loops are available and when to use them.

Email

Email is very easy to implement and is one of the most basic feedback loops of them all. While it’s a great way to get to know more about your customer, it can be hard to keep track of all the responses you’re getting.

There are two types of feedback you can get from email. You can either ask open-ended questions like this:

Open-ended questions will let your customers talk freely about your product and they will give you to most valuable info. Closed-ended questions are better if you have a couple of options you want to explore and you want to ask your customers which one is best.

Did you know? Kissmetrics combines behavioral analytics with Kissmetrics Campaigns. Use analytics to find the right audience, and send the best feedback emails to the most targeted audience.

Surveys

Surveys allow you to gather a lot of information in a short period of time.

With surveys, everything depends on what questions you ask. Asking ‘How awesome are we?’ isn’t going to help you very much, even if you’re awesome.

Here’s an example. Recently, Sumo wanted to find out how they could improve their product and pricing. To do this, they created a short survey and sent it to their users using Sumo’s own notification system.

The notification takes you to a SurveyMonkey questionnaire where you’re asked what stage your business is in and how you perceive Sumo’s pricing. It also provides a place to leave open-ended feedback.

Chat boxes

Chat boxes give you a real time, direct communication line between you and your customer.

You’ll have a much faster way of responding to inquiries, but someone has to man the chat.

Chat boxes have several advantages. The biggest one, however, is that it allows you to help a customer overcome a pain point before they get frustrated and leave.

They help increase sales, too. When Cory Miller from iThemes started using live chat on their website they noticed more opportunities to upsell customers. By building trust and answering questions, customers had more confidence in what they were buying.

Support

The good thing about support is that you probably already have it installed in your business. It’s a goldmine when it comes to product ideas or ideas for improving your customer experience.

If they have a technical problem they’ll tell you. If they don’t know how to use a feature, they’ll tell you. If they find something confusing, they’ll tell you.

The downside of support is that you can not actively request feedback from people. It’s a passive way of gathering feedback.

How to Use customer Feedback to Improve Your Business

In this section, we’ll go over some ways you can use the feedback that you’ve gained to improve your business and reduce churn. We’ll look at how to prioritize what part of your product to improve next, how you can use the feedback to improve your copy, and how you can use the feedback to craft a better user experience.

Improving your product

Making changes to your product is a big decision.

But if you do it right, it can make your life a lot easier. If you mess up, you end up increasing churn instead of decreasing it.

So how do you know what feedback to listen to and what feedback to ignore? After all, if you ask 10 people what your product should look like you’re likely to get 11 different answers.

The first thing you need to do is be crystal clear about your values. What are you trying to do? What problem are you trying to solve?

If the feedback you receive contradicts your core values, you ignore the feedback and continue building what you’re already building.

But what if you’re not sure?

In that case: count. A lot of times a small group of people will have a very strong (and loud) opinion. Count how many people are saying the same thing and if that number is big enough, adjust accordingly.

In the Leadpages example we’ve talked about earlier, you can see they’ve labeled all the suggestions. If the suggestion is aligned with their values and enough people vote for it, it gets implemented. But when the idea doesn’t fit their vision, they label it ‘will not implemented’.

This gives them a nice balance between what people want and where they want to go as a company.

Improving your Copy

To write good, persuasive copy, you need to know answers to 3 questions.

What does your customer want to achieve?

What does your customer want to avoid?

What is stopping them from achieving their goal?

Once you know that, you can write copy that inspires them to take action and overcomes objections.

But you still need to know what exact words and phrases they use. A good way to figure that out is to take your responses and turn them into word clouds. This will quickly show you what words are being used the most.

There are plenty of free services online that can help you turn feedback into word clouds. A couple of good ones are:

What words aren’t they using that they could be using? (e.g: subscribers)

What do they talk about a lot? (e.g: content)

Improving the Onboarding Experience

When customers use your product or service for the first time, they don’t know what to expect. If they don’t know what to do or what to look for, chances are they’re going to leave and look for a different solution.

The goal of your onboarding experience is to get your user to a point where they can see the value in your product. Facebook, for example, is useless if you only create an account. Once you start adding friends and join some groups, you get to see what it can do for you.

Take a look at your feedback and see if there are any recurring problems people are facing. Are they having trouble with a certain feature? Do they have no clue where to start? Are they getting confused by the UI?

Once you know what people are struggling with, you can adjust your onboarding experience to nip churn in the bud and prevent customers from leaving.

Mention, for example, already had a good idea of what users wanted thanks to user feedback. Their automated marketing process was doing a good job at converting free users into paid ones. But whenever a free user became a paid one, the whole marketing process came to a standstill.

Realizing this could increase churn, they extended the lifecycle emails to paid customers and showed them how to get the most out of every feature.

Creating content

Not only does customer feedback help you better serve your current customers, it also helps you attract new ones.

Once you have a good idea of who you are targeting, you can create content that closely fits their needs. And if you add the words and phrases you found earlier, you can really get this going and make awesome content that attracts people to your business.

You can also use the feedback to beef up your Frequently Asked Question and support sections. This will help you solve the biggest problems and it will take some pressure off you so you can work on things like your product.

Keeping Your Customers Happy

Building feedback loops into your business might seem like a ton of work.

And it is. It does take time and it does take effort. But the time and effort you put in will pay off in the long run.

By listening to your users, you start to reveal patterns that help you reduce churn. You start to reveal what your customers want. You start to reveal ways you can grow your business.

And it will make you a very happy business owner.

Have you ever used customer feedback loops to reduce churn? Let me know in the comments.

One of the most confusing aspects of marketing your local business online is trying to understand the various internet marketing terms. Here are some SEO terms and their definition to help shed some light.

* SEO – this stands for Search Engine Optimization and is a general term used to describe methods and strategies that will help your site rank better in the search engine listings.
* On page SEO- these are methods and strategies a site owner uses internally on their own site to help their site rank better.
* Off page SEO- this covers methods and strategies a site owner uses externally on other people’s websites and blogs to help his website rank better.
* Backlinking- this off page SEO method involves creating links on other people’s websites that point to your website. These links are called back links.
* No follow links- these are backlinks that do not carry the “power/authority” of the page rank of the site they are located on.
* Do follow links- these are backlinks that have the page rank of the site they are located on flowing through them to the back linked site.
* White hat SEO – these are ethical SEO tactics used by a site owner to promote his site, that are looked upon favorably by search engines
* Black hat SEO- these are unethical SEO tactics used by a site owner to promote his site, which are not desirable and may result in getting banned by search engines.
* Backlink profile – this refers to the mixture of the different type of backlinks a webmaster uses.
* Backlink Value- this is a calculation of the power of the backlinks a site owner has build. It equals the number of backlinks built multiplied by the strength of each backlink( based on the page rank of the site where the backlink is built)
* Anchor Text- this is the clickable part of text within an article or other piece of content which when clicked will direct the user to another page or site.
* Page Rank – this is a search engines measure of a webpage’s authority on a scale of 0 to 10. Search engines rank individual web pages not websites as a whole.
* Contextual links – these are back links that are embedded within the text of piece of content and are surrounded by other content. They are the most powerful type of backlinks especially if they appear on a sites homepage.
* Keyword density- the number of times a keyword appears in a piece of content, expressed as a percentage. The ideal mark is 3%.
* Outbound Links- these are links a website owner creates from his website to external websites as opposed to a backlink that links from external sites to his site.
* Indexing – a term used to describe when a search engine finds content on the web and lists it in its search results. Some content gets indexed faster than other types.

Before I get to the epiphany I had, let me preface that my wife and I are the proud owners of The Elder-Williams Pet Sanctuary. The sanctuary houses cats (Elle, Moxy, Sissy, Kitty Kat, and occasionally Heinte), and a dog (Rocky). On the fireplace mantel rests the remains of Charlie (beloved pooch), and Angel (beloved kitty). In the backyard is a cemetery plot on a beautiful mound with plants and flowers where Mr. Bunny is laid and memorialized. All of whom were rescued from some predicament or another. All of them cried out for help looking for a place just to call home and a family to be part of. All of them taken in with love and care.

They get the best food we can give them, and one is on a diet that requires special food. Morning feeding time is 5 am, earlier if Sissy wills it. Any later than that, we have the unfortunate possibility of a kitty (Sissy), pouncing on our heads. If the victim is my wife, it ends with her pulling Sissy in closer for a morning snuggle, which allows her to get a few more minutes of rest. If I am the victim, it ends with me tossing Sissy on the other side of the bed while I pull, what I am sure of, is hair from my face and the inside of my mouth, gasping with indignation (laugh).

The last kitty taken in, we found at our sliding glass door after returning from Europe. Apparently, she got the memo that if you are abandoned and need help, our address is the place you go to get that help. I really believe my wife’s name is on a virtual care list that only critters have access to, because after vet bill we were her proud new owners and Moxie moved into the house. Now, 10 months later, Moxie has still not been accepted into the head (Elle and Sissy), and we have to keep the 2 camps apart, only integrating them under watchful eyes. Sometimes it makes meal time a hair pulling experience but always an entertaining one. Think, hungry predators circling you purring, barking, and jumping (laugh). At least, In that moment, their mission is unified, and that is to eat! I am sure you get the picture!

Their healthcare is better than people utilizing The Affordable Health Care Act. They cannot be turned down by insurance (us), they have many doctors to choose from, and they have us to worry about the level of care they receive.

That brings me to my story. A usual trip to Petco to replenish cat litter started out as normal. Browsing the aisles to see if there were interesting toys, checking out the current food selection, the newest fashion trends for Rocky, and the usual passing by the cat adoption center with me telling my wife, “Honey, the Inn is full!!!”, and her getting a pouty face.

There is usually at least one kitty that stands out from the rest. It’s that one kitty that is crying out more for attention than the others. This one usually implores the “cute factor’ to such a degree, you have to stop and say “ah, she is so cute”! If there are other people standing around also saying “ah, she is so cute”, it increases the cat’s desirability and authority over the others in your mind. This situation usually ends up with an adoption taking place.

Epiphany

It was in this moment that I had an epiphany. This is what I see on a daily basis when I am consulting with businesses on their marketing and Internet Lead Generation Strategies. Many businesses seem content with just slumming in their cages waiting for a prospective buyer that is not really savvy enough to notice the business’s dull armor.

The problem with this strategy is that there is no correlation with a prospective buyers’ savviness and the business’s “cute factor”. You see, people buy because of emotions and justify that purchase with logic. They do not first say “logically this makes the most sense, now let me muster up the feeling of wanting it”. It’s only after they have decided to buy that their savvy starts justifying that decision with logic.

It matters not whether your business is real estate, mortgage, home improvement, home repair, a restaurant, a store, a professional service, or business opportunities, the need for you to get noticed, attract potential customers and make a sale is the same.

Getting Noticed

The process of getting noticed, generating leads of prospective buyers and eventually sales, is what we call SEO (Search Engine Optimization). This entails what I call, the 5 Pillars of SEO. They are:

Online Directories

Keywords

On-site Optimization

Content Generation

Link Building

Online Directories are the foundation of SEO. If your business is not showing up in the Top Online Directories, your authority typically is not very high in the eyes of Google, Bing or Yahoo and thus they are not sending your business very much traffic. Traffic turns into leads and leads turn into sales. Get the picture?

Steps To Take

To solve this problem, the first step is to check your business’s online visibility with our Online Visibility Tool. This tool checks the top Data Aggregators and the Top 50 Online Business Directories to see how noticeable you are.

The second step is to register for one of our upcoming Webinars called “Increasing Traffic and Leads Using The Power Of Online Business Directories” where I will reveal The 15 Top Online Directories, and how to submit and optimize your listings with them for maximum visibility.

“Increasing Traffic and Leads, Using The Power Of Online Business Directories” Webinar (Click Here!)

If you do not want to do this yourself you can look at our ”Done-For-You” packages that allow you to save your time while letting us do all the heavy lifting.

Press releases are an often overlooked method to get backlinks because not many people have heard of them or understand how they work. Press release sites are news release sites that operate online and despite their traditional offline definition, you don’t necessarily have to submit any “news breaking content” all one needs to do is to write an article with an objective news style.

Here are a few ideas you can use to create press release articles:
* New products or services
* Industry developments
* Professional association news
* Corporate and Community Events
* Newsworthy stories from your local TV or newspaper that relates to your business

For many press release sites you can include what’s called a contextual backlink. Contextual backlinks are the best type of backlinks to get and are characterized by being surrounded by text content. Use your main keyword as the anchor text of your backlink and link it back to the URL of the homepage of your website. However, you need to make sure that the press release site allows contextual backlinks before using them.

An important thing to note is that you shouldn’t submit the same article to all the press release sites. Instead you should submit unique articles to each site. One of the ways you can speed up your press release submissions is to take one article and spin it into many different articles, and then submit each spun article to a separate press release site.

As you go about building press release backlinks make sure you keep a list of the URLs of all the press release pages where you submitted your press releases. This helps you to build a list of Press release sites you can use in the future and to also help you build backlinks to those articles since this will help get your content indexed faster.